Survival horror is a genre that works best when you can absorb yourself in the game completely and shut out your surroundings. It’s surprising, then, that Dementium: The Ward works as well as it does, since it’s on the Nintendo DS. I usually play my DS when I’m stuck in line, on a long car trip or in any environment where I’m generally occupied by something else. And yet Dementium: The Ward manages to be engrossing, challenging and even scary.

Like many other games in the survival horror genre, Dementium: The Ward starts you in a severely hostile environment (a run-down, haunted hospital in this case) with limited weaponry and challenges you to escape your life while battling all sorts of otherworldly horrors. Along the way are some puzzles to solve, some thoroughly gruesome cutscenes and more than 10 levels of horror.

The game is played from a first-person perspective, meaning you use the stylus to aim the camera and the directional pad to move your character. I’ve always been wary of this control scheme, as moving a stylus across a screen is never as precise as using a joystick or thumb pad. But luckily, Dementium: The Ward is smart enough to keep the action simple so that you never need to look around too quickly. And the level design is simple enough that you can usually face straight ahead and not miss anything.

Unfortunately, your character suffers from the same defect as the main character in another horror game that comes to mind — namely, you can’t hold a flashlight and a weapon at the same time. Because the entire game is bathed in darkness, you’ll always want to have the flashlight out. But every time you encounter a monster (which will be often), you have to switch to a weapon in order to kill it. A lot of times, this ended up with the monster getting a free hit on me before I could get out my nightstick or gun. A monster surprising you from behind is scary the first time, but by the dozenth time, it just gets old.

The biggest flaw I encountered, however, was the game’s complete lack of midmission checkpoints. If you die in the middle of a level, you have to start from the beginning of the floor where you died. This was especially frustrating because the game lets you “save and quit,” but as soon as you reload, your save disappears. This led to me getting stuck on the third level for a very long time because I kept getting killed at the same spot. I always knew when the spot was coming up, and I badly, badly wanted to save right before I crossed the threshold of death. But alas, I would always end up getting slaughtered and have to fight my way back to the same point.

Overall, Dementium: The Ward is a haunting experience that holds up to survival horror games on major consoles. Fans of the genre are sure to love it, but newbies to the genre probably won’t be converted. Still, I love that the survival horror genre now has a presence on the Nintendo DS, further cementing the case that the DS has something for everyone.